Trivia Crack dominates App Store

A look at the new phenomena of Trivia Crack, an online trivia-based game that is taking the internet by storm

For the last 60 days, Trivia Crack has consecutively stayed at the no. 1 position atop the App Store, shattering the previous 38-day record held by Draw Something, an app released in 2012.

Trivia Crack is a turn-based game in which players compete against friends in lightning-round style trivia with questions from multiple categories including geography, history, sports and science, to name a few. The catch is that each player has only thirty seconds to answer before the next round starts.

In an interview with Business Insider, Maximo Cavazzani, CEO of Etermax, the game studio behind Trivia Crack, said, “right now we have 20 million daily active users, we now have more than 100 million registered users”.

When asked why he thinks the app has become so popular quickly, Cavazzani said, “there’s a big virality to the app because if you’re playing and you don’t know the question, you just say it out loud, and if you say it out loud, someone hears you and says, ‘What are you playing?’ That’s how you have a virality — that’s not the regular virality you see in other games. It’s just man-to-man”.

Far from being an easy process, Cavazzani further touched on why creating an app like Trivia Crack originally proved to be such a daunting task.

“At the end of 2013, after making three games, we started thinking about doing a trivia app for a platform and we realized that the main problem with trivia games was content,” said Cavazzani. “The problem was that if you live in Latin America or Argentina or Mexico, you don’t want the same questions as people who live in Spain.” “What you should do is get content for each country in each language, which is pretty difficult and very expensive. So we started thinking out of the box and we realized what we needed was for the users to create the content and also moderate it. That’s how we came out with the Question Factory.”

In fact, the release of Question Factory towards the end of 2013 would ultimately prove to be the distinguishing feature of the app, allowing users to submit and see questions specific to those submitted from others within their country, as well as bringing Trivia Crack into the limelight of the App Store. It is worth noting that once it was added to the US version of the App Store in December it skyrocketed to the top of the charts and has stayed there to this date.

In the age of apps, small gaming and programming companies often find themselves being turned into billion dollar corporations overnight. While Trivia Crack is not raking in as much money as Snapchat, it is becoming profitable as upwards of 1 per cent of all of its users buy the Trivia Crack Pro edition for $2.99. Another 50 per cent of Trivia Crack’s profit comes from in-game purchases, as well as advertisement. Despite this, a majority of Trivia Crack users are still playing for free with 99 per cent of all users choosing the free-to-play edition.

When asked about the future of Trivia Crack, as well as the supposed rumours of Trivia Crack 2, Cavazzani remarked, “We’ll see what happens. I don’t know if it’s going to work, but if it does, it’ll be something great to see”.

Trivia Crack is available for download in the iTunes App Store and the Google Play Store in both free and paid versions.